


Twice Is Happenstance

by Sanjuno



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, But it's not going anywhere, Fuck this we're out, Gen, It takes two to argue, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Sort of? - Freeform, The Author Regrets Nothing, The Uchiha Exodus that fucked over canon, The literal interpretation, This idea would not leave me alone, This is not how reincarnation works, Uchiha have no chill, Warring States Period (Naruto)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 17:53:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12846399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanjuno/pseuds/Sanjuno
Summary: Breaking through the boundaries of reality can have unintended consequences. Sometimes the pieces get put back together in the wrong order. Sometimes the edges of the broken prices no longer match quite right.Ootsutsuki Kaguya broke the world. Her descendants worked together to fix it, and defeat her for the last time. They succeeded.Then the Uchiha Clan woke up.





	Twice Is Happenstance

**Author's Note:**

> When the whole cycle of transmigration thing involving Indra and Asura popped up I spent a great deal of time screaming at the screen because _that's not how reincarnation works_! Please stop misleading the uninitiated in regards to my personal belief system oh my thousand gods and little fishes.
> 
> Er. Then this happened.

=/=

Ootsutsuki Kaguya was not of their world.

To defeat her required awakening powers that were not of their world.

The barriers between dimensions were cast down, the walls between one reality and the next were shattered, the shards flung wide as the battle between the Rabbit Goddess and her mortal descendants raged through the ether of Creation.

An echo of a battle that had been waged once before. Then, and now. There, and here. A past long since forgotten, and a future not as yet born. Different names for familiar souls. Different faces and familiar players, acting out their scripted parts.

Round and round the wheel turned.

Such conflicts shake all the worlds. Tear down the heavens. Ripple through time.

Ripples become wave, crashing down on the shores of the world like a tsunami, changing the landscape forevermore. One such wave washed ashore. A massive wave guided by unseen hands, driven forward over the obstacle of possibility by generation on generation of unquiet ghosts. Powered by the regrets born of knowledge learned too late. Given strength by the shades of lives cut short, by the injustices perpetuated upon an entire bloodline at the whim of a creeping horror shaped from betrayal and grief.

There was a singular, eternal moment wherein time and space folded in on themselves. Past and present and future braided together as history stepped forward to stand side-by-side with a dream realized. That moment was used.

That moment was _seized_.

They were Uchiha.

The Uchiha would _remember_.

/…/

Tajima was woken by the sound of his son screaming. Leaping from the bed, he lunged for the door. Ryukyu paced him, perfectly in step, and it was not until he reached the nursery that he _remembered why that could not be_.

Tajima stepped into the nursery, sharingan active and spinning-spinning-spinning perfect memory perfect recall painting a scene of pain and blood and loss across the reality of the moment. Ryukyu’s agony and the sacrifice she had made to ensure that even _one_ of their sons would _survive_. Arriving barely in time to save Madara and Izuna. Arriving far, far too late for their three youngest. Asama, slain in his cradle, still young enough for hints of new-born crimson to be found in his eyes. Minowa and Adatara, twins from beginning to end, their last breaths as close together as their first cries.

No and no and _no_ not again!

Tajima refused to see his children slaughtered _again_.

Eyes burning with more than one lifetime of rage and regret, Tajima blinked, dismissing the past that haunted his nightmares. Tajima blinked, and faltered, unable to believe his eyes for the first time in any of his lives.

The blood remained, but all else about the tableau had changed.

Izuna, his sweet, laughing second-born was crouched over Asama’s crib, a snarl on his face as black-on-red rays spun in his eyes. A ghost of black fire and bones was worn over the child’s skin, a suit of otherworldly armour.

Madara, his fiercely devoted, all-too-passionate first-born, stood in the center of the nursery surrounded by the bodies of his brother’s once-upon-another-time killers. Lips peeled back from bared teeth in a battle-mad grin under glowing eyes that rippled even as they whirled, black and red and an odd pale violet. Comets falling endlessly, spiralling, never landing. Wreathed in shadow-hued flames, armoured and armed in the bones of a warrior-god as he stood in defence of his younger brothers. Those who had come to slay Tajima’s sons once again lay crushed, those would-be killers dead and dying by Madara’s hand.

Dead and dying and, impossibly, _not_ the Senju their weapons and armour would lead an observer to believe.

Not full-blooded Clan, which was like as not why they had been chosen for this suicidal task. Mission-born, or civilian bastards, their Clan traits blunted or all-but missing entirely thanks to their out-of-Clan parent, but _recognizable_ now that Tajima had more than the ash and shards Ryukyu’s final attack had left behind last time.

After all, it had been the Kaguya Clan that had killed Tajima when he first lived this life, so he had more reason than most to know how to positively identify them.

/…/

For a long moment the Uchiha Clan’s Head Family remained still, frozen in place as it trapped in amber.

A shout from the grounds, an alarm rising as a patrol found the bodies of the guard slain by the now-dead assassins.

Everyone moved at once.

Izuna let his Susanoo fall, lunging for his elder brother with a wailing cry.

Madara caught Izuna in a desperate embrace, a tormented sob escaping him as they clutched one another close.

Minowa and Adatara clung to their mother’s waist, hobbling Ryukyu’s determined progress across the room.

Tajima swept Asama up into his arms as his youngest screeched, little hands clutching tight in Tajima’s sleep robe the moment his still-terrified father was in grabbing range.

Ryukyu and Tajima exchanged equally wide-eyed looks across the bloody floor of the nursery. Sharingan eyes searching for the trick but finding naught but reality and living, breathing sons they remembered finding dead so long ago. The shaken parents gathered their miraculously alive youngest sons closer, and bundled the tangle of limbs formed by their two eldest boys away from the carnage desecrating the nursery.

Safely away from the compromised nursery, Ryukyu dumped the twins into Tajima’s desperate grip, tipped Madara and Izuna against their father’s other side, and then the Uchiha Matriarch tore off with a screamed demand that the patrol leader report _right that damned second_!

Even over his long-missed wife’s howls of rage and spitting curses, Tajima could hear the confusion in every voice. Confusion that only grew as the commotion woke more of the Clan. Confusion that Tajima himself could well understand, holding tight to living children that he had seen die, had seen buried. Listening to the rampage of a wife he had seen laid out on her pyre, had seen die with a sword in her heart. Hearing the pulse of his blood, loud in his ears. Feeling the flow of air through his lungs when Tajima _remembered what it felt like to die twice over_.

Tajima remembered being struck down, remembered closing his eyes for the last time to his eldest son’s tearstained face. He had _died_ , had been _dead_ , had moved on for all he had continued to watch over his sons in the living world as best that he could.

Tajima had been dead for _decades_ , but now he lived and that…

That was something no shinobi could ever think to train for.

Bewildered, but with his mind already working to sort through the strangeness of his new knowledge, Tajima did his best to fit all five of his sons into his arms and waited patiently for his wife to return. It was only fair that she handle the responsibility for now, after all, Tajima had needed to rule alone for _years_ after Ryukyu died last time. He deserved the time off.

Scheming had always been more enjoyable with Ryukyu’s help, and Tajima foresaw a _great deal_ of scheming being necessary in the immediate future.

/…/

Madara was too confused to speak, a twelve year old boy with over a century of memories. A century of war and blood and loss. A century of dark, creeping horrors and his body falling to ruin. Years on decades of dying by increments all the while being trapped unwillingly to life.

Madara was twelve going on one hundred and fifty, and it was tearing his mind apart.

“… niki! Aniki, _please_ , please look at me! Aniki, _please!_ ” Small hands cupped his face, a born sensor’s awareness of chakra allowing him to _know_ beyond doubt that _Izuna_ was plastered against him. Pleading with him. “Aniki!”

With a shudder, Madara uncurled enough to raise his head, pulling back only _just_ far enough to look his younger brother in the eye.

Past bled into Future faded in the face of the Present. Empty sockets weeping blood down a too-still too-pale face still wearing that damning smile… an image banished by a frantic gaze, bright with crystalline tears that streaked clear trails over flushed cheeks, still soft with youth.

“ _Izuna_.” A sob caught in his throat, terror choking him as Madara felt his eyes shift and _change_. Familiar from _before_ , from that horrid future. Izuna’s eyes and Izuna’s power added to Madara’s own. The only thing holding back the screams was the sight of falling stars whirling into place in Izuna’s eyes, even as rays stretched out across Madara’s iris’.

Madara had lived over a century in agony, watching the world through Izuna’s eyes, unable to forget his pain for even a _moment_.

Now, at last, _at last_! Izuna was looking back, watching Madara with _Madara’s own eyes_.

An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye. Somehow, some way, Madara and Izuna still shared their power. Shared, not stolen, _never_ stolen. He could still see. Izuna _still had his eyes_.

Relief flooding him, Madara wept, tears catching on his smile as he touched his forehead to his brother’s, eyes never leaving Izuna’s. “Little brother, you’re _alive_. Alive, alive, _alive_.”

“You too, Aniki. You’re alive too!” Izuna hiccupped, his own tears renewed, and clung with white-knuckled hands to Madara’s blood-splattered sleeping robe.

“We’re all alive.” Warm and fond and achingly familiar, their father’s calloused hand carded through Madara’s mane of wild tangles, then through Izuna’s smoother locks. The smoky crackle of Tajima’s chakra was straining, as always, to protect them. A shield for his sons, for his wife, for his Clan. Even when Madara had outstripped him in power, so long ago, now, not too far in the future, now. Even when angry and despairing and unable to understand his eldest son’s reluctance to make war. Even then, Tajima had wanted for nothing more that the safety of his loved ones. “Look up, Madara. Look at me. Look at your other brothers. We’re all here.”

Eerily synchronized, identical Makengyou turned. Faced the rest of their family. Joy was far too small a word to fully encompass the light that sparked to life in Madara’s eyes, but Tajima could not find a better description. Joy, and love, and a breathless wonder banishing the last of the broken emptiness that Tajima would _bleed the world dry_ to never see on Madara’s face again.

The two boys shifted, Izuna moving to guard his elder brother’s back even in the center of their family home. Madara reached out to gather his youngest brothers close, confident enough with Izuna on lookout to relax his guard.

“Minowa. Adatara. Asama.” A murmured litany, all too familiar from visits to the family shrine, yet wondrously strange to hear again, as the litany was uttered in relieved joy rather than wretched sorrow. Izuna peered curiously over Madara’s shoulder, taking in the sight of three tiny faces that were Izuna’s to coddle and protect as Madara had always done for him.

Asama, all of three, peered at his brother’s glowing red eyes with a curiously blank expression. Adatara’s wide gaze and unexpectedly brilliant grin fought for space on the six year old’s face. Minowa looked from his grinning twin, to his father, to his eldest brother, and promptly burst into tears.

“What the hell?” Izuna yelped, dodging back as Minowa flung himself at Madara with a howl. The lunge sending Adatara and Asama tumbling to either side with startled squeaks.

“Sorry! I’m sorry!” Minowa hiccupped, all but climbing into Madara’s robe even while sobbing so hard he could barely speak. “Sasuke, I’m so sorry! I left you alone _again_! Aniki, I’m sorry!”

“Minowa, you…” Madara looked stunned, overwhelmed and overjoyed as he clutched his little brother close. “It wasn’t _your_ fault!”

Adatara blinked, gave their father an odd look, stared at Izuna in fascination, and then focused on his twin. “… Itachi?”

“No!” Minowa denied savagely, face flushed in blotchy patches and eyes burning crimson with a waking Sharingan. “I don’t wanna be him! I wanna stay with Aniki this time!”

“Shh. Itachi and Minowa are both good.” Madara murmured, stroking back the smooth fall of Minowa’s hair. “I love all my brothers. So if you want to be Minowa, you can be Minowa.”

Red eyes stared up at Madara with desperate hope and worshipful gratitude and unrestrained relief. “Promise?”

“I promise.” Madara managed to rasp out, tucking Minowa close, stricken with throat-closing grief as the memories threatened to overwhelm him once again.

“… Ooh. That’s _weird_.” Izuna pressed the heel of one hand to his forehead as he realized, somewhat belatedly, what was going on. “I think I agree with Min-chan. I’d rather be Izuna, instead of Obito. Do you want to be Madara or Sasuke, Aniki?”

“… I’m so confused right now.” Adatara mumbled, his eyes shifting red as his memories settled, another life rising to the foreground like a shoreline revealed by the falling tide. “But also drowning while bleeding out and blinded _sucks_. It’s too soon for me to be comfortable with being Shisui again.”

“It would seem that Uchiha reincarnate as Uchiha, and often within their direct bloodlines.” Tajima observed quietly, Asama sitting still and cautiously watchful in his arms. “And who was it you became once the wheel turned, my little one?”

“Mm?” Asama tilted his head and stared at the tears leaking from his brother’s eyes in fascination. “… Sai.”

“… Midriff boy was an Uchiha? Really?” Madara made a strange face as he processed that.

“Makes some kind of sense.” Izuna scowled. “Danzo stole kids from all the Clans, and _you know_ how weird Outsiders get about our eyes.”

“ _Ugh_.” All the Uchiha shuddered. The future was traumatizing, and contained a truly disproportionate amount of eye gouging.

“It is of no consequence.” Tajima stated with certainly solid enough to build a temple on. “You are my sons. Who you might have been in your next lives matters not.”

“Really, Fugaku-sama?” Adatara blinked at the Uchiha Clan Patriarch, Sharingan flickering in odd spurts. “Even if we’re Shisui and Obito-ni and Sai-kun sometimes?”

“Even then.” Tajima confirmed, and then looked at Minowa with sorrow softening the corners of his mouth. “… I forgive Itachi for what he was made to do. I remember what the Hatake boy became, what he was like. I should have taken that example as the warning it was and never allowed Itachi to graduate from the Academy early. Uchiha Clan Tradition forbids such things for a _reason_.”

“But!” Minowa scrubbed at his eyes, a perfect match in pattern to Adatara’s, but the action only encouraged the tears to flow more freely. “But I killed you and Kaachan! I hurt Aniki!”

“And we forgave Itachi even as his sword struck home.” Ryukyu shut the door gently behind her before swiftly crossing to her family. Dropping to her knees beside her weeping sons, Ryukyu folded comforting arms around them both. “Mikoto and Fugaku forgave Itachi, Min-chan. So you can let him go. Ryukyu and Tajima are alive. Madara and Izuna and Adatara and Asama _and Minowa_ are alive. Let those other lives rest. It is not their time. Take knowledge and wisdom from them if you will, but let the pain and the hurts go. They are not yours yet, and you must be able to live in the _now_ if you wish to find joy.”

“ _Kaachan!_ ” Minowa sobbed, releasing Madara to cling instead to Ryukyu, burrowing into her arms desperately.

“Wise words.” Tajima smiled at his wife, fond and proud to have won her regard and affections not only once, but twice over. “Listen to your mother, my sons. The Clan will need our strength in the coming days.”

“Wait… You think _everyone_ is like us?” Izuna’s complexion shaded slightly green, and he glanced at the windows like a man expecting to be hunted down. “Um… doesn’t that mean that most of them will, uh… remember Itachi and Obito, um…”

“You killed all of them. Oh! Except for me and Sasuke-Aniki.” Asama noted with disturbing cheer. “That will make things awkward.”

“There were extenuating circumstances!” Adatara flailed, somehow communicating the entire web of coercion, blackmail, brainwashing, and mind-control that had killed the Uchiha Clan of Konohagakure with a few spastic gestures.

“The Clan understands. I’ve already spoken to a few.” Ryukyu gently stroked Minowa’s hair. “So many of us dying, so close together? We remained together in the next world. You wouldn’t know it, thanks to the Sage’s Curse pulling you from the Pure Lands so quickly, Madara, but Uchiha spirits learn from one another. Our souls _remember_ , and when Shishui’s memories met with those of the Clan, and then Itachi’s, and Obito’s as well… we’ve understood for a long time. And forgave them both.”

“We are all alive, now. Any grudges that might exist over being killed…” Tajima shrugged, the pragmatism from Fugaku’s police career blunting the Warlord’s desire for vengeance. “It no longer has just cause.”

“Wow.” Izuna snuggled into Madara’s side, peering at his father in bemusement. “Just, _wow_. It’s odd to hear you talk like this, Tousan.”

“We’ve all changed.” Madara murmured, wrapping an arm around Izuna in absentminded affection even as his gaze went unfocused.

“Aniki?” Adatara leaned on Madara’s knee and peered up at his eldest brother’s face in concern. “Are you okay?”

“I feel like Madara, but I _remember_ being Indra. I remember…” Madara stared off in the distance without seeing, ignoring his family’s wide eyes as the litany of names continued. “… I remember meeting Asura, lifetime after lifetime, and… I remember him killing me, lifetime after lifetime. Kaasan was right to call it a Curse. The Sage’s Cycle of Transmigration… I never had the time to learn, or heal. I was ripped away from peace, and forced back into the world to be killed by my brother again and again. Even as Sasuke, when I tried to kill Asura _first_ , before he could kill me again… I was held back. I _couldn’t_. Not Naruto. Not Itachi. I can never land a fatal blow on my brother, whomever he might be…”

“That’s why you need to _stay away from the Senju_!” Izuna was up on his knees, hands fisted in Madara’s robe. “I _know_ you’ve been thinking about making peace with the Senju early! Half the _Clan’s_ probably thinking the same thing! _Especially_ those _traitorous backstabbing assholes_ who abandoned the Clan after I died! But I won’t let you! I _won’t_!”

“Izuna?” Madara blinked, startled by the strength of his brother’s feelings. A small voice in the back of his head snorted, and dryly noted that Obito had always held a level of inexplicable resentment for the Uchiha Clan. Izuna’s ghost blaming them for abandoning Madara to isolation madness and grief cleared up that mystery. “But… Konoha?”

“Konoha was a trap.” Asama piped up, still seated on his father’s lap and not looking likely to be dislodged any time soon. The smallest Uchiha wore a smile that looked painted on, and that expression was going to unnerve his future opponents _thoroughly_. For now, the three year old’s eyes were too sharp and too knowing to fit well on his small face. “Konoha _killed_ the Uchiha, and did so without remorse.”

“Asama’s right, Aniki.” Izuna pleaded desperately. “Can’t you see? I’ve had to watch him kill you twice! I won’t _let_ there be a third time!”

“Listen to _your_ brothers, my Madara.” Ryukyu slashed a quelling hand through the air, forestalling her eldest son’s argument before it could begin. “Do not deny it! Hashirama of the Senju is _nothing_ to you!”

“But…” Madara looked down, absently leaning into his brother’s possessive holds. “The peace…”

“The peace was an illusion. And a poor one at that.” Tajima sighed, sad and regretful. “All we can do is focus on what we _can_ do, right _now_ , to save our family from a repeating tragedy. I refuse for my _entire Clan_ to _spontaneously resurrect_ only to die in droves once more.”

“You’re Madara now, anyway.” Minowa spoke quietly, half muffled by Ryukyu’s robe. “You’re _our_ brother.”

“Ootsutsuki Indra is dead, slain by Oostustsuki Asura with the unspoken blessing of Oostutsuki Hagoromo for the _crime_ of being too similar in his thinking to his Grandmother, Oostutsuki Kaguya.” Tajima shook his head, aching down to the core of his soul from the echoes of other lives in his chakra. Once, in the long ago past, he had been born as the son of his own son. Once, in a distant future, his wife had been born as their son’s daughter. It was enough spin the world the wrong way around. “ _You_ , here and now are _Uchiha Madara_ , and _I_ am your father!”

“Indra is _dead_ and _dust_.” Ryukyu echoed her husband’s sentiment, grim and certain as a landslide. “Asura is _not your brother_. Hagoromo is _not your father_!”

“No… no, you’re right.” Madara took a deep breath and released it in a sigh, looking up at his family gathered close and daring to defy the will of the world to protect one another. “… Not anymore.”

=/=

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not ashamed. Sure, this is... _also_ Very Much Not How Reincarnation Works but fuck it all, Naruto started it. Plus magic ninja with magic doom eyes and _aliens_. I just... no. Fuck it all.
> 
> I do what I want. XP
> 
> Dunno if I'll ever do more with this 'verse, because in my head they all fucked off to an uninhabited jungle island subcontinent where they built some Atlantis-esque pyromaniacal utopia that they only leave under very specific conditions. (Such as hunting down a spouse because they're not really into any of their Clan oh whoops what do you mean Izuna-Obito's run off to hunt down the pre-incarnations of Kakashi and Rin oh no gods damn it Madara get back here!)


End file.
